50 Psychology Classics (54 page)

Sheehy is well known for her incisive magazine character profiles, which have included George W. Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, Newt Gingrich, Margaret Thatcher, and Saddam Hussein. A long-time contributing editor to
Vanity Fair,
she has won a number of awards for her journalism
.

Passages
was on the
New York Times
bestseller list for three years and was translated into 28 languages. It was named one of the ten most influential books of our time in a Library of Congress survey
.

Sheehy's other books include
Pathfinders
(1981),
The Silent Passage: Menopause
(1992),
Understanding Men's Passages
(1998),
Hillary's Choice,
a profile of Hillary Clinton (1999), and
Sex and the Seasoned Woman
(2006). To take account of changes in culture and society, Sheehy provided an updated version of her work in
New Passages
(1995)
.

“Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of his world. Today he is the thing he understands least. Physics and biology have come a long way, but there has been no comparable development of anything like a science of human behavior.”

“The nomad on horseback in Outer Mongolia and the astronaut in outer space are different people, but, as far as we know, if they had been exchanged at birth, they would have taken each other's place.”

“Although cultures are improved by people whose wisdom and compassion may supply clues to what they do or will do, the ultimate improvement comes from the environment which makes them wise and compassionate.”

In a nutshell

Like all animals, humans are creatures shaped by their environment—but we also have the ability to adjust or create new environments.

In a similar vein
Harry Harlow
The Nature of Love
(p 142)
Stanley Milgram
Obedience to Authority
(p 198)
Ivan Pavlov
Conditioned Reflexes
(p 210)
Steven Pinker
The Blank Slate
(p 228)

One of the most controversial figures in the history of psychology, Skinner was famous for seeing humans as no different to animals. Even as a young psychology student he rebelled against what he saw as the romantic idea that human action was the result of inner emotions, thoughts, and drives (the “psyche”). Rather, as Pavlov's work indicated (see p 210), humans should be analyzed as animals interacting with their environment.

Yet in his theory of “operant behavior,” Skinner went beyond Pavlov. Humans were not simply reflexive machines, he argued, but also changed their actions according to the
consequences
of their behavior. This philosophical distinction allowed for the incredible variety of human difference, while allowing adhesion to the behaviorist line that humans were basically creatures of their environment.

Skinner became behaviorism's most famous exponent, partly because he was a brilliant experimenter (pigeons were to Skinner as dogs were to Pavlov), but also because he could write. His combination of technical skill and a desire to see the big, philosophical picture was unusual, the result being esteem by his peers
and
the production of bestselling books that made people think.

Beyond Freedom and Dignity
was written at a time when issues such as overpopulation and nuclear war seemed a terrible threat. The very survival of the human species appeared to be at stake. What could be done?

While Skinner noted that it was natural to try to solve the world's problems by advances in technology or science, he asserted that real solutions would only emerge when people's
behavior
changed. Having contraceptives was no guarantee that people would use them; access to more advanced agricultural techniques did not ensure their application.
People
caused problems, yet it was not enough to create a better relationship between people and technology, or even to personalize technology. Rather, what was needed was a “technology of behavior.”

Skinner noted how little psychology had advanced compared to physics and biology. In ancient Greece, people's understanding of what made them tick was as good as their understanding of how the universe worked. But today,
while our knowledge in the hard sciences had moved ahead by leaps and bounds, our understanding of ourselves was no greater.

Skinner believed that the science of psychology looked for the causes of behavior in the wrong place, and was therefore fundamentally in error. We no longer believe that people are possessed by demons, he noted, yet psychology was still based on the view that our behavior is determined by “indwelling agents.” In Freudian psychology, for instance, the actions of one human body are driven by the interaction of not one but three of these inner elements (the id, the ego, and the superego). The medieval alchemists attributed to each person a mystical “essence” that shaped behavior, and today we believe in something called “human nature” that is said to move us. The result is that we are told that all the world's problems boil down to changing inner attitudes: overcoming pride, lessening the desire for power or aggression, increasing selfrespect, creating a sense of purpose, and so on.

Yet for Skinner, all such conceptions of human beings were “prescientific.” Physics and biology long ago gave up the idea that objects or animals are driven by an “inner purpose,” yet we still say that a nonphysical feeling “causes” a physical act of aggression. It is a given that states of mind cause behavior. This “mentalism,” as Skinner called it, meant that behavior was not studied in its own right.

Skinner noted that if we ask someone why they went to the theater, and they say “I felt like going,” we accept this as an explanation. However, it would be more accurate to know what has made them go in the past, what they have read or heard about the play, and any other environmental factors that led to their decision to go. We think of people as “centers from which behavior emanates,” when it is more accurate to see people as the end result of the influence of the world on them, and their reactions to the world. We don't need to know about a person's state of mind, feelings, personality, plans, or purposes in order to study behavior. To know why people act as they do, Skinner suggested, all we need to know is what circumstances caused them to act in a certain way.

Our environments are not simply the setting for our self-willed actions, but shape us into what we are. We change the course of our actions according to what we learn is good for us (our survival) or not so good. We believe that we act autonomously, but it is more accurate to observe that we act according to what “reinforces” our actions. Just as a species prospers or withers depending on how it interacts with and adapts to its environment, so the person we are is the result of our interaction and adjustment to the world we are born into.

What is meant by Skinner's title,
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
? He acknowledged that the “literature of freedom” had been successful in the past in inspiring people to rebel against oppressive authorities. These writings naturally linked control and exploitation of humans with evil, and escape from that control as good.

But Skinner found something missing from this simple equation: We have actually designed our societies to involve many different forms of control that are based on aversion or inducement instead of outright force. Most of these more subtle forms of control people are willing to submit to because they ultimately serve their own social or economic ends. For instance, millions of people hate their jobs, yet they stay because of the consequences of not working; they are controlled by aversion rather than force, but controlled nevertheless. Nearly all of us live in communities, and to maintain themselves communities require a certain amount of control. Would it not be better to admit that we are not as free and autonomous as we would like to believe, to be open about choosing the forms of control to which we will submit? Why not get scientific about the forms of control that are most effective? This is the essence of behaviorism.

Punishment, according to Skinner, is a clumsy way of dealing with people who have not understood and reacted properly to society's larger goals. A better way is to change behaviors by reinforcing alternative courses of action. You can't give people a purpose or intention, but you can make some behaviors more attractive and others less so. Given the massive shaping power of the environment, Skinner wrote, it is a much better use of a culture's resources to “proceed to the design of better environments rather than of better men.” We can't change a mind. We can only change the environment that may prompt someone to act differently.

Skinner's point was that we spend a huge amount of energy upholding the ethic of individualism, when as a species we could achieve more by focusing on the type of environmental situations that produce remarkable achievements. He did not deny that there were great people who had made tremendous contributions, but he believed we would produce more such people not through an ethic of triumphant individualism, but through creating more conducive environments.

Skinner put it in these terms: “Although cultures are improved by people whose wisdom and compassion may supply clues to what they do or will do, the ultimate improvement comes from the environment which makes them wise and compassionate.” What we consider “traits of character” are really the culmination of a history of environmental reinforcement. In short, Skinner
believed that we put human beings on a pedestal. While Hamlet was made to say of man, “How like a god!”, Skinner also notes Pavlov's observation of us, “How like a dog!” Skinner felt we were more than a dog, and marveled at the complexity of human beings and their actions—yet he also said we were no different than dogs in being able subjects of scientific analysis. While poets, writers, philosophers, and authors had long celebrated the inner motive that guided the human self, Skinner's clinical definition was: “A self is a repertoire of behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies.”

What about conscience and morality? Skinner had this to say: “Man is not a moral animal in the sense of possessing a special trait or virtue; he has built a kind of social environment which induces him to behave in moral ways.”

Although Skinner believed that each person was unique, down to every fiber of their body, he also felt this was missing the point. Each individual was a stage in a process that began a long time before they came into existence, and would continue long after they had gone. Within this larger context, was it not foolish to make a lot of noise about individuality? Surely it was more productive to see ourselves as a link in a long chain, shaped by our genetic history and environment, but also with the capacity to shape that environment in turn.

Beyond Freedom and Dignity
attracted a great deal of controversy when it was published, as it seemed to undermine the ethic of personal freedom. But were Skinner's ideas really that dangerous?

Freedom is a wonderful concept, but cultures and communities, by their very nature, require a dense apparatus of control to survive. Skinner described the evolution of a culture as “a kind of gigantic exercise in self-control,” which was no different to the way that individuals organize their life to ensure their continuing existence and prosperity. Control was therefore a fact of life; his point was that it was possible to create cultures in which there were less aversionary controls such as the threat of punishment, and more positive ones that people freely agreed to. This was the scenario sketched out in his fictional Utopian classic
Walden II
. On the surface this sounds like early communism, but the key difference is that communist ideology was built around a misplaced faith in human nature. In contrast, behaviorism aimed to analyze scientifically how humans really act; any culture deriving from its ideas would not be built on a vain hope but observable facts.

One of Skinner's most fascinating points, which perhaps has relevance for our times, is that cultures that put freedom and dignity above all else, that take the “romantic” view of psychology concerning the freedom of the inner person and so on, risk being surpassed by other cultures that put their survival first. Countries may pride themselves on being “right,” but such inflexibility does not always guarantee a future.

If you have always firmly held to an Ayn Rand-like belief in personal responsibility, free will, and the primacy of the individual, Skinner may cause a revolution in your thinking. Did he actually believe that the idea of the individual should be abolished? No, simply that of the “inner person” who is said to heroically manipulate their environment to their ends. We don't change humans by being scientific about them, Skinner remarked, any more than Isaac Newton's analysis of a rainbow lessened its beauty.

While Skinner remains unfashionable, he had a major influence across a range of areas. In time the popular view of him as the cold man of the lab may well change to reflect the reality of someone who knew that there was too much at stake to gamble with ideologies and romantic ideas of humanity. In aiming to find a scientific basis for improving our lot, he was a genuine humanitarian.

Burrhus Frederic (“Fred”) Skinner was born in 1904 in Susquehanna, a small railroad town in Pennsylvania, United States. His father was a lawyer and his mother a housewife
.